I am a mechanical engineer and Six Sigma Black Belt by training, and have come to love the beautiful game in my adult life. I turned to my numerical training after becoming a Seattle Sounders FC and Arsenal supporter in 2009 in the hopes of accelerating my understanding of the new game I loved. I've been writing my own blog for over two years, and have written for such outlets as "The Tomkins Times", "The Transfer Price Index", and Howler Magazine. My goal is to advance the understanding of the English Premier League and Major League Soccer through numerical means.

Everything We Know About Soccer Is Wrong

It has been nearly two months since The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong was published in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, meaning that soccer quants in North America have had to pay for international shipping if they wanted to get their hands on the book. The need for such expensive shipping ends on July 30th, 2013 when the book is published in both the United States and Canada by Penguin. While the authors of the book, Chris Anderson and David Sally, have been very pleased with the book’s reception in Europe they are looking forward to what they hope is a slightly different reaction in North America. David Sally explained,

“I think we are really glad with the reaction in the UK and The Netherlands where the book launched a few weeks ago. I think we’re hoping the reaction is going to be even stronger in the US because there is more of an appetite for statistics in sports. It’s a more natural audience. I think there is also the coolness and hipness factor to soccer. A lot of people are trying to understand the game more deeply, and we hope the books serves as a way to get even deeper into the game.”

Chris Anderson believes North Americans’ appetite for numbers combined with soccer being a less popular sport than it is in Europe makes the book perfect learning material about a game that is rising in popularity.

“[Dave and I] are Americans, and we love American soccer. We’d love to see the game grow in the US, so in whatever small way the book can tell them something about soccer they didn’t know but they wanted to know and will help them understand and make sense of what’s going on on the field when they’re watching or their kids are playing. If we can contribute to helping grow soccer in the US in whatever small way I’d personally be really excited about that.”

The way Anderson and Sally approach learning about the game is by asking repeated, intelligent questions, answering them with the best available data, and then asking the next logical question that comes from the answer to the previous question. In laymen’s terms, they end up pealing back the layers of the soccer onion. The duo divides their examination of the game into three parts:

Before the Match, which examines the larger patterns within the game that seem largely immutable: luck accounts for 50% of the outcome of a match, frequency of scorelines are relatively consistent between top leagues, and the rarity of goal scoring makes the game somewhat unpredictable and the value of goal scorers dependent upon when they score their goals versus the scoreline of the match.

On the Pitch, which explains how the game is a balance of strategies. Preventing a goal is more important to earning points than scoring one, the game is about managing turnovers, and the game can be controlled by both tiki taka as well as keeping the ball out of play longer than the average team does.

In the Dugout, which ties the first two chapters together to highlight how coaches and managers uniquely contribute to their teams’ success. It’s the weakest of the players they recruit or who are left from the previous manager that have a bigger impact on success than the best ones, how substitution strategy can help cover up players who get weaker throughout a match, and why managers are more than “stuffed teddy bears.”

Anderson’s and Sally’s methodical breakdown of the game, a complete review of which can be found here, is admittedly not targeted to the “high-end analytics professional.” It is instead meant to assist the long-term fan in quantifying what their eyes have been seeing for years or to help the new fan understand the beautiful motions on the field with which they’re just beginning to fall in love. What the authors did emphasize during an interview was that both professionals and fans could learn from the book’s thought processes. Anderson elaborated,

“This is not meant to be mischievous, but one of the things I would advise people to do is what the book has done for me in writing it. Once you read the book and start thinking about football in the terms we lay out and the ways we lay out in terms of what the numbers do and do not tell us, even in very basic ways, it leads you down the path of asking the next question, and the next question, and the next question. In terms of stuff one could talk to clubs about, it is sort of about asking the next three questions from where the book leaves off. Maybe one way to think about it is that this is a cheap intro to a way of seeing the game. If you acquire a few tools and some data you can take this a whole lot further. I guess what we’d advise clubs to do is to do just that – to invest in the data. Not as the holy grail and not as the only way of doing soccer management, but as a way of asking some really good questions and getting some really valuable answers.”

If there has been one consistent criticism of the book in England, it is of the book’s subtitle. The authors feel such criticism is more due to a misunderstanding of the word “you” being interpreted as the authors having some insider knowledge that the common reader does not. As they point out, the subtitle was meant to be a generic “you” that implied the need for continual questioning of the basic assumptions behind the game that could be addressed via statistical analysis. When pressed if they might have changed the subtitle now knowing the reaction they have received, both authors conceded they might have indeed replaced the “you” with “we.”

One of the topical disagreements with the book has come fromSoccernomics author and economics professor Stefan Szymanski whose book Soccernomics with Simon Kuper makes a strong case that the economic fundamentals of a club – how much it pays its players – determine how well it does in a season. He took issue with the book’s contention that managers really do matter when it comes to teams’ success and failure. Szymanski himself concedes in his critique that both books are targeted towards non-academics, and the answer to this fundamental question might require the complexity introduced by academic research. Such back and forth begs the question: is this a debate where both sides may just end up agreeing to disagree? David Sally suggests the two sets of authors are closer than their critiques suggest.

“I think in some ways we already agree a lot with Szymanski in terms of the impact of the manager. I think we were emphasizing a balance, as we do with a number of topics in the book, between the extremes of the manager not mattering at all versus being the most important man on the field. I think where we came out was that the manager is one of the most important factors in the short term and medium term performance of a soccer team, but not nearly as important as the level of wages that are paid and other factors that are relatively fixed about a club including its legacy, what kind of infrastructure it has, the stadium, and so on.”

The differences we see to such a simple question – Do managers matter? – suggests there is a greater complexity in determining whether or not a manger succeeds or fails, and that complexity isn’t easily captured in handy statistics. Anderson explains why,

“When it comes to the manager, it is key to think through analytically ‘Ok, so how would we know how much the manager matters?’ One way to think about that is by success in the transfer market. One way to think about it is to think about how to win games. One way to think about it is the value somebody adds to the squad. In the book, we talk about [former Liverpool and Chelsea manager Rafa] Benitez and his willingness to work with players on the training ground to improve them. There are so many moving parts to the manager that from an analytics perspective it is really tricky to get your head round how and how much they matter. To me, the chapters about managers are about asking the right questions about managers rather than providing very firm answers.”

The debate between Szymanski and Anderson/Sally is indicative of another trend: those who buy The Numbers Game are also buying Soccernomics, or vice versa, according to the Amazon.com “Customers who Bought” feature. Discussions with both books’ authors indicate sales by both publishers back up such trends. Readers are also buying Inverting the Pyramid (new edition available November 5, 2013), suggesting that The Numbers Game has carved out a spot amongst the few books that offer a systematic or numerical treatment of the beautiful game. Such a position is well deserved for a book that quantifies some well-known rules of thumb, quantifies some unexpected answers to more complex questions, and continuously challenges the reader to think differently about the game.

If the US and Canadian version of the book may suffer from anything, it is a lack of coverage of these two nations’ domestic leagues. Such an omission is completely understandable given the worldwide nature of the game and the fact that its top tier, and thus most popular, leagues are located in Europe. Nonetheless, the North American reader may be left wondering where Major League Soccer ranks in the world once the book (properly) label it a “lesser league” that doesn’t conform to the convergence trends of the higher quality leagues in England, Spain, Italy, and Germany.

A quick calculation by this author indicates there may be some good comparisons that can be made between MLS and the other leagues highlighted in this book. On May 26, 2013, the Seattle Sounders lost 4-0 to the LA Galaxy in Carson, CA. It was a hard loss for a team having a rough start to the season, and came on the heels of a 4-0 home win against the struggling San Jose Earthquakes. Some might point to the league’s parity as a source of such different results, but it turns out the frequency of such results in MLS seems to fit a bigger pattern across leagues. Over the last nine years of MLS games a 4-0 home win has occurred in 1.85% of the matches. The data in The Numbers Game shows the same type of result happens in 1.89% of Premier League matches. Coincidence? The numbers suggest that’s unlikely. In other attributes the leagues may be further apart, but someone must run the numbers to know which attributes are similar and which are different.

Perhaps MLS is just one of the many topics that a second edition of the book can expand upon as the sport grows within both the United States and Canada. Or maybe readers won’t wait for the second edition, and instead duplicate some of Anderson’s and Sally’s research themselves. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Either way, North American soccer fans would do very well to pick up this book. It will not only help them understand the game better, but it will also stimulate new ways to analyze and think about the game. If, as Anderson and Sally admit, that was one of the main goals of the book, they have succeeded in their task.

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